The integration of cannabis into the society will have far-reaching impacts - not as a result of people consuming it, but as a result of people understanding it.
The emerging legitimate cannabis market and industry impacts the society, the culture, and the economy. As a writer, lobbyist, and policy wonk, Kate Cholewa offers a broad perspective for those both inside and outside the movement and industry.

Occupy Reality

Had to get off the Facebook because I was becoming too reactive to it. My attention went to the options I was given, looking too much at what was happening, and not enough at the as-of-yet-uncreated road ahead.

But alas, we take ourselves with us wherever we go and I took my attention from one streaming media right to another and instead ended up checking in regularly at a cosmic conspiracy theory website that offered a varied, daily news feed – politics, Occupy Wall Street, medical marijuana news, some new age, some economics, astronomy, natural medicine, a little physics. No movie stars. But it does go out there on the edge sometimes with what it includes in the feed, UFO sightings, for example. I believe in some whacked out stuff. I don’t know why I turn my nose up at the idea of aliens. Nonetheless, apparently, a fairly popular current doomsday theory is that high-ranking members of the government have been in cahoots with the aliens for years (the World Weekly News was right!) and now the shit is coming down.

Imprisoned by aliens on our own planet – wouldn’t it just be the worst? If we were in a made-for-the-t.v. movie we’d have to use our human ingenuity to prevail. They’d have studied us. So to outfox them, our plan would have to be based on a uniquely human quality that you can only understand by actually being human and not just studying them.

But I think we’re fine.

Since we’re not living in a made-for-the-t.v. movie, I also tune into the Occupy twitter feeds from around the country, the world, and watch videos of thousands of people in the streets in Oakland and New York. Tear gas is being used on citizens and a former marine suffered a fractured skull and swelling in the brain from a rubber bullet fired by the Oakland police. Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, hundreds in some cases, thousands in others, people on the streets saying ‘no’ to the manufactured reality pumped into the culture. Some say Occupy is anti-government. Others claim it’s calling for an expansion of government. What it is is anti-corporate control of government, politics, markets, and all of civil society.

While video and tweets showed people running in the streets of major cities, CNN was featuring a story about how satisfied Gen X is with life, a story about a middle class guy who doesn’t agree with the Occupy movement, and one about how the Occupy movement is becoming violent. (Tear gas and rubber bullets – ouch, ouch, ouch – sounds violent to me.)

Business as usual is not the name of the game. And the stock market is lying really low. What’s the money doing so quietly? Finding out what’s real?

Lies. They’re just not holding up like they used to. And when they fail to cast their spell, they dig in deeper and get out the guns. Your belief in the lie is not required. That you don’t interfere with the constructing of the world as if the lie were true, is.